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Worm Found In Womans Brain

Doctors expected to find a tumor on Rosemary Alvarez’s brain, instead they found a worm.

Doctors in Arizona who operated on woman with a suspected brain tumor, found that something very different had been penetrating her brain.

During the operation to remove the tumor, doctors found that it had not been a brain tumor that showed up on the CAT scan, instead it was a worm.

Rosemary Alvarez started experiencing blurry vision and a numbness in her arm when she decided to visit the doctor. After two trips to the emergency room and a CAT scan, her diagnosis was still unclear. It wasn’t until doctors to a closer look at the MRI that they discovered what they thought might have been a tumor.

“Once we saw the MRI we realized this is something not good,” neurosurgeon, Dr. Peter Nakaji told the news station. “It’s something down in her brain stem which is as deep in the brain as you can be.”

Alvarez was quickly taken into surgery where Nakaji and his colleagues expected to remove a tumor. To Nakaji’s surprise and great relief, they uncovered a worm.

On a video of the surgery, Nakaji can be heard chuckling after he made the discovery.

“I’m sure this is a very strange response for the people in the operating room… “But I was so pleased to know that it wasn’t going to be something terrible.” he explained.

Now the worm has been removed, doctors expect Alvarez to make full recovery with lingering health problems.

No one knows where exactly she picked up the worm, doctors say most worms come from eating undercooked pork or spread by people who don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom.

Nakaji said:

“It only takes one person who is spreading it constantly to get a lot of people exposed and some of those people are going to go on to develop this problem,”

Alvarez has now returned to her normal life with her family, she hopes that her ordeal will help people learn from her mistakes: